"Falling": My interview with Richard Dutcher

I had the chance recently to catch a special screening of Richard Dutcher's Falling. The film tells the story of Eric Boyle (played by Dutcher), an aspiring filmmaker in L.A. who makes his money as a stringer--that is, being the first one to a crime scene with his camera and selling the footage to news stations. Boyle, a lapsed Mormon, finds himself at a spiritual rock bottom after capturing a brutal murder on tape, and the film traces three days in his life as he tries to turn himself around--and hopes that it isn't too late. The film was briefly released theatrically in Salt Lake and L.A. last year, and will see another release next year, both theatrically and on DVD. It's an incredible, powerful film, and I'll be publishing my full review shortly.

This Monday I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Dutcher about life, movies, future projects, and the process of making a movie over the span of a decade.

EXAMINER: I’ve been a really big fan of all your work since God’s Army, and I’m curious generally if there are certain things that compel you to tell particular stories?

DUTCHER: Well, it kind of stems from my first film, which was Girl Crazy. It was totally an independent film, very low-budget, I spent about $21,000 shooting it, and the total cost was about $50,000. I didn’t come from money, so I had to go out and raise money and it took forever, and I was raising money through the whole process and using credit cards and the whole deal, and the whole process, from conceiving it to actually selling it to getting it to HBO—Cinemax picked it up—was about five years. And looking back on it at that point, it was such a risk and it was so difficult to get it made, and it basically represented about five years of my life, and it was in the end just this romantic comedy, kind of a trivial piece of fluff. It was cute, but it certainly wasn’t worth that much time and that much risk, so after I finished that I just decided that if I was going to do that again—and I knew I was, because I wanted to make films—I decided I would never again do something trivial. So that’s where the next four or five films came from, thinking I had to do something that was personal, something that meant something to me, something that, for me, helped me to explore things that I was very interested in, so that even if it took another five years to get a film made, and if the film wasn’t financially successful, I’d still be proud of it. If you’re just trying to do something commercial and it bankrupts you, or you do it and you get it out there but for whatever reason it’s just not profitable and people don’t go see it, then you don’t have anything. But if you make a film that you really care about—you know, even if it doesn’t make money, it’s still time well spent. So that’s where that came from. I decided to make films that just in themselves made me passionate enough that I was willing to go out and do all the things that I don’t particularly enjoy doing, all the business stuff.

One thing I really like about all four of your films I’ve seen—God’s Army, Brigham City, States of Grace, and Falling—is that it seems like they come from a very real, honest place, not just emotionally, but also culturally. I thought one thing that was really interesting about Falling was not just the Mormon culture that you have in those other films, but also the culture of this seedy L.A. film underworld. I was wondering if you had anything to say about writing what you know, because the films seem to really know those cultures. 

Yeah. Yeah, there’s definitely truth to that. It’s interesting how often you hear that, “Write what you know.” When I first started writing I was writing, you know, whatever I thought people wanted to see—vampire movies, whatever. And that was all really fun to do, and it would’ve been great if some of those had been made, I still might make some of those someday, but it was a totally different experience than when you’re sitting down and trying to create something personal, trying to tell your story, trying to tell the story that only you can tell, or a story, at least, that only you are interested in telling. What I find most satisfying is not, “This is what I know,” and sharing it, it’s more, “These are questions that I have,” or, “These are concerns that I have,” or something that fascinates me and then going into it to find out why it fascinates me, or to go into it to try to find answers to questions I don’t have answers for yet. That’s made it very satisfying; the past ten years have been very satisfying. It’s kind of like my personal journey and my filmmaking development have worked together—one feeds the other. And I think that’s the best way to do it. So I’ve been a little spoiled, but now I have to concentrate on seeing if I can do something commercial so that I can afford… The script I’m doing, I’m actually going to start shooting it later this year, is another very personal film. For me it’s very important to keep those projects happening. It keeps me passionate, because there’s just so much garbage that you don’t want to deal with, between all the business stuff and running a business and trying to get distribution and all the things that really have nothing to do with storytelling, but you have to do it in order to tell the story. You know, I don’t get up in the morning and go, “Oh, great! I get to go out and raise money!” But I do get up and get excited about telling a story—writing a story, or shaping it and getting it made. That’s exciting.

Do you think there’s any fundamental difference between, for example, what Martin Scorsese does with Catholicism in a movie like Mean Streets and the Mormon foundation in something like Falling or Brigham City or States of Grace?

Oh yeah, I think there’s definitely a similarity. Especially in his [Scorsese’s] early films—Who’s That Knocking At My Door? It’s probably his most Catholic, and I really appreciated that part of it—he really brings in the Catholicism and some of the iconography and stuff. Later, I was really interested when he started working with Paul Schrader, because he [Schrader] brought the Calvinist psychology to it, and Scorsese had the Catholic thing, and they did some really interested stuff together. And I think it definitely enriches the films; in both those cases and in a few others you see filmmakers using the culture and the psychology of the characters and the iconography of the religion in a way that’s very much intertwined with the story rather than just art direction. And I always find that fascinating.

Do you guys have plans for a DVD release date for Falling?

Well what we’re doing, because of the kind of film that it is, it’s not a super commercial kind of film and so there’s not a real rush to get it out in the marketplace, and because I have patient investors, and because I feel like it deserves a bigger audience than it’s had, what I’ve decided to do is to hold it and we’re going to go ahead and do the Evil Angel release and then release Falling on the heels of that, kind of piggyback Falling on top of Evil Angel—have the trailer on Evil Angel, and when the DVD comes out have a trailer and material inside to help push it a little bit and maybe give it a little bit bigger audience than it would have otherwise. So actually, even though it’s been shown already in L.A. and Salt Lake, it’ll have a wider release next year in theaters. It’s going to go out again in probably about seven cities and we’ll see how it does—and I’m not expecting, you know, lines around the block or anything, it’s not that kind of movie. And then the DVD release will be just a couple months after Evil Angel.

Good—I want to see it again. And I want other people to see it too so I can talk about it. So is there anything you can point to specifically for where you got the idea for Falling? 

I’d been kicking around, playing around with two different concepts. One was the concept of a man going through this spiritual transformation, and then I had this separate story of this video stringer, and I was very fascinated by that kind of story and culture. That story was a little more conventional—it was a guy going out and videotaping a murder and then the gang guys coming back after him. And neither one of them were exciting enough to me to just go do it, but then when I had the idea to put the two together, that’s when I got really excited about it and cranked it out. I think it helped, because certainly the spiritual journey of the character helps to deepen the more conventional suspense kind of story, and then also the suspense part of it helps to make the spiritual journey a little more cinematic and a little more interesting. I really loved watching and following and seeing what was going to happen.

How did you learn about that video stringer community? That was really interesting.

I was watching a Frontline or American Experience or something. It was just some Sunday or Saturday morning and I turned on the TV and there was a report about these guys in L.A. and I just became fascinated with it and did some research. It was kind of an underground thing, people don’t really know about it, so it was fun to look into it and to try to accurately portray it—giving the guy the kind of skuzzy, junky office that those guys really do have. The coolest thing about that though—I was trying hard to accurately portray it, and then we were actually shooting one day, we were shooting the reporter next to the fire truck, and we wrap up, it’s like ten o’ clock at night, and as we’re leaving, you know, we were renting this fire truck, and we got a call about a fire that was like five miles away. And so I was done, I was in my wardrobe and my truck was there, you know, and my camera and everything—I was using my camera as the camera—and so I just jumped in and went to the fire, and jumped out, and I had no idea what that was going to be like, I just wanted to do it, so I just pulled in as close to the fire trucks as I could, ran in close to the fire, and started shooting firemen and the burning building and stuff, and some of that footage I used in the beginning of the film. But the coolest part about that was—I mean first of all, all the firemen and cops and everybody, I had my little fake tag, I was running around in there, they just assumed I was one of the stringers—the coolest part was I was shooting this, and I look over and I see these two other stringers who showed up, and so I started watching them and it was really interesting. I talked to them, and it was interesting to just go, “Wow, we nailed this.” The guys were very much like the guys that I was portraying in the film—the same equipment, the same kind of attitude, same thing where they’d just listen to their scanners and go hit whatever and try to sell it. And I actually pulled some of their footage that they had shot on accidents and things to use at the beginning as well. So some of that footage was actual footage from some of those guys that I met that were shooting that fire scene. So that was kind of cool, and it was kind of a fun experience to walk away with not only some great fire footage that I wasn’t then going to have to go pay for, but to also step away and just go, “Wow, nailed it.”

One thing that I thought was really interesting about the film was how it dealt with the voyeuristic nature of film. It reminded me at times of Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. It seemed that there were a lot of things that happened structurally with the camera seeing something and then Eric the character experiencing it—with his wife in bed, and with the things he films and what happens to him in the very end of the film.

Well, it came as an extension of the character, to think that he would experience the world and kind of see the world a lot through this camera—it’s almost like an appendage for him. Especially at the beginning there when he’s videotaping his wife and then he goes to make love with her and she doesn’t want to, and then you see him sitting there [watching his footage] and it’s almost like he’s experiencing things vicariously through technology, which was something I was trying to get at, without taking it too far. I remember in the process there was a point where I was thinking, “How far should I take this?” As far as, “Can he only experience things through the lens of the camera? Does he have to see it there for it to make any emotional impact?” And I thought, “No, no, that’s crap, I’m going to step away.” So I took it as far as I felt like was realistic, and I kind of told that story without it becoming pretentious and false. I didn’t want it to be false.

I thought it was interesting, there was sort of a sense of almost “you are what you consume” that I thought came through with that in the film.

It definitely has an impact, yeah.

I thought it was really interesting, and—I don’t know, kind of problematic, but in a way that I felt was really captivating and that’s kept me thinking a lot—it’s a film that seems is a lot about how it can be spiritually and morally dangerous to be exposed to this kind of shocking and degrading material, and yet it’s also one of the most shockingly violent I’ve seen. I didn’t necessarily think it was a fault of the film because it was so fascinating, but it was also very paradoxical.

Yeah, that was intentional. I’ve heard criticism before where people have thought that because of that last violent scene that it kind of violated what they interpreted to be the theme of the movie. And I can see that point of view, but I think that’s stepping back away from it. I was taking us into this world and what I felt was the reality of what was going on, and I think that kind of a criticism is when people step back and are looking at it in a more removed, intellectual way, whereas for me it was, “This is what happens and this is the logical conclusion,” and at that point it was very important for me to communicate on as realistic a level as I could what the end was going to be like, and what it meant—what he became, what he experienced. That fight scene was very, very important to me. There’s no music—of course, there’s no music in the entire film, except on the radio when he’s driving around—but, you know, I really wanted to capture that experience, as close as possible to what real physical violence is, what a real fight is, not some kung fu thing, and to try to communicate to people watching it, to get a glimpse of how ugly that is, and also just to really take all the gloss away from it and say, this is what the movie’s really about. And so I felt it was necessary to go there. I actually pulled back a little bit from some of the stuff that we’d shot, because it stepped over and it became about the gore. We had a false head we were smashing with a brick and you could see the head just coming apart, but at that point it just became unreal again. It was like, “No, we’ve got to pull it back into something that feels real.” So I’m very proud of that fight scene. I had a way that I wanted to shoot it and we were scheduled for like one day and we went back four days to shoot it because I just wanted to see this progression and this… And also we kept hurting each other, which was great. [Laughter] I mean, I broke my thumb, I broke a rib. Cesar, he didn’t break anything, but he got pretty bruised up. When we were doing it—and I refused to use stunt people, I just had him doing it—and he saw that I was willing to, you know, actually shed some blood and fall on the concrete and take real punches and stuff, then it was like, “Oh, OK”—he couldn’t whine about it because I was doing it. So I think it turned out to be a great thing. I watch it and I can still feel, “Oh, that’s where I broke the rib!”

I think it works really well because the whole film is really visceral—you really are there for the whole ride, I felt. It was a really anxiety-inducing movie.

Yeah, I really enjoyed stripping all the conventions of the Hollywood fight scene—so there’s no music, no choreography. I mean, it was choreographed in a sense, we knew exactly what we were going to do, but it wasn’t some martial arts thing, people taking hits and not really feeling the result. It was messy, you know—shots going wild. So it was fun to do. I use the word “fun” just because when it was completed and cut together it was like, “Yep, that’s what I wanted. That’s what I wanted to do.” And so I totally stand by the end—again, it’s taking this man, and how far did this situation take him, and what he was capable of doing and what he kind of became; it was really necessary. I wanted to take it as far as I could so that when he’s confronted at the end… You know, he knows what’s happened, what he’s just done, and now he’s confronted with his innocence and the fact that it’s gone. It was important.

The way the whole movie was shot and edited really mirrored the style of Eric’s footage. One of my favorite scenes in the whole film is with Eric in the car with the gun, and it goes on for a long time, and the way you cut from the front seat, front-view angle to behind you in the back-seat. I thought it was really interesting the way you toy with and subvert our expectations of violence in film to really make us aware of what we’re feeling as viewers, and the really horrible sorts of things we often buy into with film and media.

Yeah, that was intentional, too, the cutting back behind him, because, you know, if he was going to blow his head off that’s exactly where the camera would be so you could see the carnage, so definitely I was having fun playing with that, and then, like you say, subverting it, saying, “Nope, not gonna give it to you.” The way that I had written the scene was a little bit different, and while we were shooting it I decided I didn’t want to do it that way. He was supposed to be against a brick wall, and I was going to have him put the gun up and I was going to tilt the camera up, so that his head was right at the bottom of the frame and so you’d have this big wall behind him, so it was the same thing. But then when I decided that it worked better dramatically and I wanted it in the car, I had to figure out a way to do that same thing in a different location. So that’s where the pulling behind went. I was really tickled with that.

It was such a powerful moment for me because I was really invested in this character and really cared about him and so that was the last thing I wanted to see happen—but also, just formally, the film was setting that up, and so just on an instinctive level I did want to see that. I thought it was really effective how you made us aware of that.

I really like that scene, and one thing that I like—we just parked and shot that scene on a street in L.A., and so the extras you see going behind and stuff, those weren’t ours. You see a guy pushing a little vacuum carpet cleaner thing and people walking around and that wasn’t, you know, planned out, it was just what was happening on the street behind us. There were cars passing by. But seeing that scene cut together now, it’s just so… I just love that—I love the reality of it. Who would think to have a guy pushing a carpet cleaner thing in the background? And yet it’s so perfect and so real, it really adds something to it.

It has a real documentary sort of feel to it that I’m sure comes a lot from just shooting on the fly.

Yeah, that approach to doing it really adds to it. I had a guy in L.A., after he saw it he wanted to go out and raise money to shoot it again with, like, Robert Downey Jr. or something, and a lot of money, and I just thought, “I don’t really want that.” I think that more money and production values wouldn’t help it. Just little things like that that wouldn’t, with more of a glossy approach, work as well.

Back to that mirror-like structure of seeing something with a camera and then experiencing it, there’s a very powerful moment near the end when Eric finds himself on the other end of the camera, on the news.

Yeah, that was important—the karma, what comes around. I liked having the other stringer guy there, you know, put his camera down for a minute to have a personal moment—and then start filming again. [Laughter.] It’s really realistic.

Eric pitches a script to this movie producer, and the producer tells him, you know, you need to shock, you need violence that people haven’t seen before—and then the film has this shocking violence I hadn’t seen before.

You know, that’s interesting, and it’s a little… I like things about this movie because it’s not as cut-and-dried as you’d think. And that conversation, actually, was very close to a real conversation that I had with a producer. And yeah, and that argument can be made, but at the same time, everything else about the film seems to subvert commercial expectations. So yeah, there’s that, but at the same time the film is so clearly not aiming to please the marketplace.

And it’s not at all pleased with its violence, like, you know, a Tarantino movie, like the producer mentions.

Right.

And it is these things that aren’t cut-and-dried that have kept me thinking about the movie since I’ve seen it, the ambiguities.

Right, which causes more thought. There’s more thinking about it—more than just, you know, “Here’s your message.”

I really love Brigham City and States of Grace as well, I think they’re both just amazing movies, but, while they have a lot of questions, I think, at their core, they also have a lot more answers and a lot more resolution than this film does.

Yeah, that’s true.

There’s also the scene with Eric’s wife, Davey, auditioning for the film that is also a really amazingly effective and poignant scene, and really well shot and edited, but also raises some of these questions again. In some ways the scene is a condemnation of asking a performer to expose herself in that way physically, but then, also, there is on-screen nudity, though very brief and non-explicit and not licentious at all.

I remember the day I shot that scene, I was very pleased with it, and I remember I said to Virginia, the actress, “I think that’s the best scene I’ve ever directed.” I don’t know if that’s true, but that’s the way it felt at the time. I shot it so I could have some leeway so I could pull back or go a little farther to see what the right tone and the right level was in there. And yeah, I was designing it a little to play with the audience’s expectations. Some people have been very honest with me and have just said they really wanted to see her naked—obviously, though, the scene wasn’t supposed to be a titillating scene, but they still have been programmed to go, “Ooh, we get to see the naked lady.” And then they’re a little disappointed, and then it’s, “Well yeah, I’m glad we didn’t see that.” I tried to make the audience enough of a participant so they would feel a little grimy and a little uncomfortable. And including the scene of her walking away—that was very important to me, because I felt like she needed to be exposed and it needed to be a kind of an unattractive thing, whereas if I had actually shown her standing there, just naked, which I thought about doing but I didn’t… And I think it was the right choice. I like the way the scene plays, where you’re more in her shoes, emotionally, understanding what’s going on without being the voyeurs—you’re watching these men watch her.

You sort of feel dirty, like an accomplice with these guys in the casting session, but you’re still seeing things from Davey’s point of view emotionally—it’s a really painful and poignant balance.

Yeah. It was fun to direct, just to kind of choreograph the camera a little bit. That’s one where I have gone back and thought, “If I were to cut it again would I do the full nudity?” I don’t think I would; I think I like the way it came out. But I can see again some ambiguity there, where you say, “Why are you willing to go so far with violence and not so far with the nudity?” And, again, it’s not an intellectual thing—you take the scene and the whole film scene by scene and try to find the emotional truth. So that’s where it landed, and I’m pretty happy with it.

So you wrote this film in 1999, you shot it immediately after States of Grace, and you edited it… When did you edit it?

After States of Grace. I came back and cut States of Grace and released it, and then I went back and cut Falling—and spent a long time cutting it, it was great. [Laughter] I mean, I had an ideal situation, because I’d shot all this stuff and I was able to just sit on it and then go back later, and, not being in a hurry, but try to find the movie. It was interesting how the movie evolved in the editing, because I was able to just take the time. And it was interesting too, because as I shot it, my subconscious was kind of working on it, and I knew there were things that I’d shot where I’d go, “OK, I’m not going to use that.” But the most exciting thing for me was—again, because I wasn’t on a strict timeline—I cut it together and I felt like, “It’s almost there. I’ve got it, but there’s something—this ending’s not quite there yet.” And instead of just having to shoot something and do it, you know, I was able to keep tinkering and playing with it. And then I brought an editor in to just do some tightening for me, and as I was looking at it one night—we were in pre-production for Evil Angel, I was in a hotel room in Salt Lake and I’d brought the equipment up so that across the hall I could be editing Falling, and it just occurred to me what to do with the ending, and I was like, “Oh, fantastic!” So then we shot Evil Angel and I took a few weeks and I ran back and shot a little bit more of Falling, then came back, cut it in, and I was very happy with it. See, that’s the film that’s been the most satisfying for me artistically. Usually with films a lot of the creativity goes into the script, and then when you direct it you either make the script a little better or you fall a little short, and that’s pretty much it—you edit it and there’s music and stuff, but it’s pretty much you shoot the script and that’s what it is. So this was fascinating because I really poured everything into the script, and then when I was directing I just poured everything into the directing, and then in the editing it still felt a lot like the script process where it was really shaping it in a different way and being open to letting the film go somewhere totally different. I think what it is, is there was something I was telling that I didn’t consciously know, and to be able to have that time to be able to work with all this material to get to the point where I could understand, “Oh, that’s what this movie’s about—that’s what I’m doing.” That was exciting. It was discovering the film in the final stages of editing. And you go, “OK, now I know exactly what I need,” and you go back and you shoot these little things and you stick them in and the movie will be what it should be. And then the other fascinating thing about the film was, once I had that, once I felt like this is really the film that I always wanted it to be—and I had never had this experience before—when I was ready to show the film in Salt Lake, we had audiences coming, and I just had the strangest feeling. They wanted me to speak after the screening, and so I did, you know—people were commenting on it and I answered some questions, and I walked away and there was a real temptation for me to just say, “Pull it. I don’t care if anybody sees it, it’s not for them. I did what I wanted to do, the film’s what I want it to be, it’s my film.” There was this temptation, a real temptation to just say, “OK, it’s mine. Take it away,” and I’d just keep it for myself. Weird, huh? I’ve never had that. Usually you want people to see it. And in a way, maybe it was because it was so intensely personal, I just didn’t really care to have people picking at it.

It feels really personal. There’s a vulnerability that’s up on screen, it just feels very real.

Yeah, so anyway. It was interesting. I take that as a good sign. I don’t have that for Evil Angel. With Evil Angel it’s like, “Hey, everybody should come see it. Get some popcorn, come on in.” But for movies like this, it’s really just like opening up. And that part of the process doesn’t seem as necessary to me. Letting other people see it doesn’t feel as necessary as all the other films.

This may be kind of personal, but I think it’s a really interesting aspect of the film and the creation of the film—you wrote Falling while working on God’s Army, shot it immediately after States of Grace, and edited it after having formally left Mormonism.

Yeah—again, that was something else that was very unique about the film. Usually you write a film and shoot it, and there it goes. But this one, it was written and it sat for a few years, and then it was shot and it sat for a couple years, and this whole time I was going through this incredible transformation. So it was interesting that these key creative contributions were done by the same person, but in different phases of his life. It was collaborating with myself at different points. Directing it, I was thinking, “Oh, this is kind of what I wanted to say when I was writing it—but no, not so much anymore, now I want to kind of tweak it this way.” And then the same thing with editing, it was like, “Oh, this is what the director shot, and yeah, I think I’m going to change it a little bit more.” It was fascinating. I would love to be able to, as I’m making other films, keep having this kind of experience, where you make something personal in a film that doesn’t have to rush to the marketplace, where you can just completely absorb yourself in your writing of it, completely absorb yourself in your directing of it, and then completely absorb yourself in the editing, and allow whatever has happened in your life in those periods to inform each process. In some ways, that’s probably what added a lot to the complexity, because it wasn’t just so cut-and-dried, it was a little bit more of a conversation with myself through different periods.

Yeah, this doesn’t feel like a “message movie” at all—I really think “exploration” is the best word to describe it.

Yeah. It was the believer, the doubter, and the non-believer all working together and wanting to satisfy all three people with the same story. The thing that people are always surprised by is that I wrote it back before I shot God’s Army—after I’d written God’s Army, but before I’d shot it. But it was always intended to be the film that it was—even then, you know, it was structurally the same, everything happened the same, the end and the violence at the end was all the same. Obviously there were things that developed and adapted, but sometimes people want to track this trajectory, which is easy to do and it sounds good, but it’s not there; I think I’m a little more complex than that. But I was ready to shoot, I was going to go immediately from God’s Army to Falling and shoot it right afterwards, and as I was going to L.A. to cast Falling, that’s when I had the idea for Brigham City and I realized I needed to do that first, because I felt like if I made Falling… I don’t think people would’ve known what to do. [Laughter] If I’d gone right from God’s Army to Falling it would have been a little too much of a shock, so I just felt right about waiting and shooting Brigham City first. And then when Brigham City didn’t perform as well commercially as we wanted it to—because it did pretty well in retrospect—I was worried that I wouldn’t get to make Falling. And so when I put together States of Grace I just decided that I was going to figure a way to do it, even if it was no budget at all, just somehow get it shot. And so I’m glad I did. If I hadn’t done it after States of Grace it would’ve been hard to get it made.

And they all three feel like very personal movies. It doesn’t feel like Brigham City or States of Grace were made just to get the market ready for Falling; all three are really sincere, really interesting movies.

That’s the thing. That’s the other reason why I feel like it’s important to make these kind of films, because if you’re a developing human being, if you’re evolving—which I hope most people are—then there’s a time that you can do something. Right now I’m grateful to have God’s Army because I enjoy it and it’s a very sincere expression of myself at that time, but I couldn’t make it now. It just wouldn’t be anything like what it is. So I feel like it’s very important every two or three years at least to make something that personal—you know, open up your soul and here’s what it is, because that time’s going to pass and you’re going to be on to something else. I guess if you’re not evolving then it’s not that important. [Laughter] And I suppose you can see that in some filmmakers, where their obsessions and their fascinations don’t really change and they don’t really seem to have anything to add to it, and in that case it’s not that interesting. But I think when you find filmmakers who are using their art to help them explore and develop—that’s fascinating. What I really hope to have is a good forty years of personal movies that will be able in that way to kind of tell my story through fictions. But yeah, you don’t want to make the same movie over and over. [Laughter]

The film not only seems extremely personal, but also in some ways very openly autobiographical—I’m thinking specifically of the references to some of your earlier films; you include a very brief clip from the first God’s Army as a flashback, and the plot of the film for which Davey auditions is a synopsis of your first feature, Girl Crazy. I thought these bits added a layer of honesty and authenticity, rather than feeling, as many similarly self-referential films do, like just a wink-wink-nudge-nudge for the audience.

Yeah. Again, I think it’s just a continuing story, you know. The film was an examination of all this stuff. But I thought it was really cool to be able to pull footage from a movie several years before if it works in the story. I think in that film, too, I was asking a lot of questions about my work, what I do, so it was important to bring those things out.

You talked about making Girl Crazy, and how in some ways it seemed that you’d spent five years of your life on something that ultimately felt inconsequential, and in Falling there’s a very heartbreaking moment when Eric says that he feels he’s done nothing worthwhile in the last 12 years.

Yeah.

Is there anything else you want to say about Falling?

Well, I like all my films, but there’s something about this one that makes it something more to me. There was an interesting thing about it that I don’t think I’ve ever talked about before, but there’s an interesting thing about playing a part like that in a film like this. I almost pulled out, actually. As I was getting ready to shoot it there was another actor who I thought, “This guy could probably play this part,” and I thought of stepping back. But then I didn’t. At some point in the future I’m going to write about this—there’s a different connection you feel. Like with States of Grace—I really like the film a lot, but I wasn’t in it, and there’s something when you’re in it. You’re engaged in this world in a different way when you’re actually playing a part in it, and you’re engaged with the characters in a way that you’re not if you’re just the director, shaping and molding the performances. But there’s something—a totally different level of experience—when you’re in the film. Especially a film like this, where I was trying to communicate a spiritual descent that was kind of a metaphorical representation of a spiritual descent that I had experienced. And that’s one of the reasons why I chose to do the film. I realized that what I was trying to communicate was something that another actor wouldn’t know. There was a time in God’s Army when I was directing Matthew Brown in the prayer scene, and we went through so much film trying to express what it felt like to have this personal kind of spiritual contact with the divine—which he hadn’t experienced, so it was hard to communicate. So we shot it, and I thought maybe we had it, so I went back to the editing room to cut it and it didn’t work. We had to go back again and shoot some more, and it was just so frustrating to have to spend so much time and burn so much film to get something that I could’ve just dropped down and done it like that—which is what happened at the end of Brigham City, the sacrament scene was just so easy, we didn’t have to spend a lot of time, it was just sit down, burn through it, and move on, because I knew exactly what the character was experiencing and I didn’t have to mess with it. And that was really important with Falling, but the kind of toll that it took was pretty… [Laughter] I mean it was something else. It took a little recovery after shooting the film to just get out of that again, and yet I’m really grateful for it because it was such an experience, and I think it added to the authenticity and the sincerity of the film to have done that. That’s another thing I’m often asked about, “Why are you in your films?” It’s tricky, because I recognize that in a lot of cases another actor would do just fine, maybe better than I could do, but when I’m dealing with these things that to me are so deeply spiritual, deeply personal and emotional, there may be another actor who’s better looking than I am, there may be one who’s more charismatic than I am, but there’s not going to be somebody who can communicate this in the way that I can do it—because I can relive it. I can just relive it and run the cameras. So it’s not a vanity thing. I had somebody say that, a critic on God’s Army who called it a vanity project, and I was like, “What the hell?” But I can see how it could be interpreted that way. But there’s a difference—a drastic difference between the two. There’s a fun part of it—like in Evil Angel, I’ll take a supporting role because it’ll be fun to do, and then there’s something like Falling or Brigham City or God’s Army where I just feel like it’s part of my duty. If I’m going to make this film, I’ve got to contribute not just the writing and the directing and knowing where to put the camera and all that kind of stuff, but I’ve got to communicate my emotional life at the same time.

I think your performances are really integral to all three of those movies, but especially Falling, for me. I was really particularly impressed with your work as an actor in that film.

Thanks.

What about after Evil Angel? Have you got anything lined up after that?

Yeah. I’ve got these two projects that are ready to shoot. One of them that I’m going to be shooting in a couple months is called The Irish Set, and it’s a kind of an experimental comedy thing that I’m doing, a kind of interesting character piece that I’m doing about some guys that get together regularly at an Irish bar. But I’ve never seen a movie done like this, so that’s one of the things that intrigues me. So, The Irish Set, and then the one that I’m going to start shooting in the winter and then mostly next spring is called The Garden House, and that’s a deeply personal movie, which is a romance, but kind of a spiritual romance.

Is there anything else you want to say about either of those projects or Evil Angel? 

Evil Angel was just a hoot to make, it was so much fun after doing this other string of movies. I kind of describe it like I made a bunch of Easter and Christmas movies, and now I was making a Halloween movie. It’s just a rollercoaster. And it was really nice to do that, it was a nice break to go from the searching and the exploring and the serious stuff, and then to do something fun—which seems like it contradicts what I was saying earlier about not spending your life on something trivial, and in some ways I guess it does. I mean, if I had given up personal films in order to do that for the rest of my time, absolutely. But it was nice to get a good paycheck for doing something just fun, and it was rejuvenating. But now I want to go back and do some more exploration. So I love Evil Angel, and I love watching people watch it. It’s really a director’s movie, in the sense of trying to get a reaction out of an audience, and then watching them have that reaction is very fun. The Irish Set is just an experiment that I want to do—and I think it’s going to work, and I think there’s going to be a ton of copycats afterwards. I’d been playing around with doing different kinds of comedies for awhile, and I didn’t want to do something that was just formulaic, something that had been done before. So I kept batting around ideas, and this one came up this year. I’m going to shoot that one this year in Salt Lake City; it’s set in Chicago, but I’m going to shoot it in Salt Lake City. And then The Garden House—it’s mostly a spring-summer movie, but there’s some winter scenes, so I’m going to go ahead and shoot the winter scenes this coming winter, and then shoot the rest in the spring or summer, depending on the weather. Again, that’s another one that came out of a challenge, where I’ve been kind of obsessed with this idea of, “Do you have to have conflict in a movie?” And it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a deeply romantic, deeply sensual kind of movie, so I’m doing that. Those who kind of know my filmography will see a definite working of some religious and spiritual themes in that film. It definitely belongs in that canon even though it’s going to be very different visually and it’s going to be very different just because I haven’t made an all-out romance. So it’s going to be cool—next year is going to be a lot of fun. I’ll get to shoot two, so it’s going to be great.

(Photos courtesy of Main Street Movie Company.)